BritBox: The Best British TV

Been a subscriber for a few years now to Britbox and Acorn. I enjoy both and find value in both. I am into the mysteries and comedy shows with the occasional history show throw in. I do wish there was more options or deeper trove of shows across UK, NZ, AUS and Canada. Especially options of shows from the late 90s early 00s. I have watched just about everything on both services except the soaps and the morning shows. I find the closed captions are quite glitchy. I have a hearing loss in one ear then add in some accents are difficult to understand to my American ear I can find it quite difficult to follow the story without the captions. Several times the wrong closed captions have appeared for the entire show in a series, the captions belonged to a different episode, they had been flipped. Other times it was clear that most of the dialogue was off script as the captions didn’t match at all what was on the screen. When I contacted them they said they couldn’t do anything about it. Which I find quite odd.

January 2021. If you’re going to use this app on a TV it’s now somewhat stable. On an iPad, forget it. What a piece of junk. It forces the Home Screen into portrait mode and then when you select a program it will finally switch to landscape mode. No thought to look and feel? Next it will sit their with a spinning arrow for an inordinate amount of time. It appears to be downloading or caching the entire show before starting. February 2020 update: works fairly consistently on iPad. On AppleTV4 (latest) it frequently crashes. “Could not load BritBox, network error - Retry” gets stuck on the screen and the only solution is to delete the app and reinstall. May 2020 update. Crashing on AppleTV4 has gotten to the point the app is unusable. Almost a daily occurrence now that on loading the app, the usual BritBox could not load - retry error comes up, but now it does that with the previous viewed content blurred out but still running in the background. When is this going to get fixed!!?? November 2023. Things stabilized for a while but this application is the only streaming service I have that continues to be glitchy. When will you provide an app on a Samsung latest gen tv that works. I have to continually reinstall this app or stop it because it keeps pausing and spooling content and go watch on another device. No other streaming app behaves this way and I have a gigabit internet feed

Before this newest update, I’d rate my two-year BritBox membership a 10-star streaming option for it’s variety, quality, and frequent additions of vintage and current programming. I’ve used my membership access to review various shows for an online magazine. However, this Nov. 2020 update has many issues! I was very disappointed that my “entertainment” iPad (10.3.3) no longer plays the video, even though it states it works on IOS 10.0.0 and above; I hear the audio, but see nothing. I can access programming on my “business” iPad, but the full-screen is still not a real “full” screen, and watching on my iPhone is, of course, inherently small. Also the app is aligned with portrait for browsing and landscape for viewing making it just slightly annoying. Lastly, the video end before the ending credits finish...maybe it’s an OCD thing, but I like for the program to be complete, ending credits and all. I do like the addition of the 10-second forward or rewind. I’m not in anyway saying “so long,” I greatly enjoy my daily “Brit Fix” way too much and just hopes these and other issues will be addressed and corrected...soon. If and when they do, I’ll revise my review!